AIM Product Highlights

With the latest release of ANSYS AIM, you can further accelerate product design through upfront simulation, eliminate late-stage design changes and reduce the number of costly physical prototypes. Upfront simulation helps you make informed decisions early in the product’s lifecycle, improving your productivity and minimizing the need for rework and redesign later in the process. AIM makes upfront simulation easy by combining intuitive, guided workflows, accurate simulation results and customization in a complete simulation tool covering a broad range of physics. ANSYS AIM enhances upfront simulation for magnetic frequency response and thermal management and extends collaboration among designers and analysts.

As important as it is to get accurate results, it's just as important to communicate those results effectively to colleagues and customers. The new post-processing tools in AIM enable you to generate impactful images and animations of qualitative results.

Results contours, vectors, streamlines and calculated values, as well as multiple simulation results, can now be combined in a single display. Also included is ability to display minimum/maximum values and dynamic values at the cursor location. This makes it easier to find specific values of interest when and where desired.

Structures:

Topology optimization

AIM now supports topology optimization for obtaining an ideal strength-to-weight ratio of structural bodies. AIM suggests optimized shapes otherwise too complex to envision, and gives you several ideas for refinement and fine-tuning of your desired results.
Coupled with SpaceClaim, AIM's built-in geometry editor, it's easy to iterate through several designs and further optimize any shape.

Nonlinear materials

Support for bi-linear isotropic hardening plasticity means that you can specify not only an elastic modulus, but a yield strength and tangent modulus. This can be used to produce more accurate results in cases where stresses exceed the yield point, such as in overloading of materials.

Electromagnetics:

Enhanced solution control for magnetics

Out of the box, AIM gives you higher fidelity results when solving for things like magnetic force, torque and magnetic flux density. Improved usability let's you quickly define solid and stranded conductors and associated currents. New solution performance settings let you adjust speed vs. accuracy, providing the results you want in the time desired.

With AIM you can perform one-way thermal-magnetic coupling and upfront simulation of magnetic frequency response and thermal management — including induced eddy/displacement currents and induction heating— of electromagnetic devices such as transformers, converters and bus bars. AIM’s single user interface, streamlined workflows and automatic adaptive solution enable you to easily evaluate both the magnetic and thermal performance of electromagnetic designs.

Fluids:

Time-dependent fluid flow, heat transfer and particle flow

An important fluids enhancement is the support for transient fluid flow and heat transfer, where fluid and solid conditions are time-dependent. This helps you to simulate transient behavior in real-world conditions, such as start-up from initial conditions or vortex shedding.

Particle flow support lets you model discrete particles in a continuous fluid. You can specify particle injection conditions to define the initial conditions of the individual particles, and specify how a particle will behave when it reaches a physical boundary (reflection, escape, etc.). This new capability allows design engineers to model gas or liquid flows that transport particles they couldn't simulate in the past.

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Porous media simulation

AIM now lets you specify porous media characteristics to accurately consider and simulate the momentum loss as fluid passes through things like filters, perforated plates, packed beds and flow distributors. Previous simulations were limited only to things having a 3-D representation, but with this enhancement you only need to know the volume porosity (area ratio), or viscous and inertial resistance coefficients.

Improve collaboration between designers and analysts

AIM now makes engineering collaboration easier by letting you transfer simulation models from AIM to either Mechanical or Fluent via a Workbench project schematic connection. You can quickly transfer model data to ANSYS flagship solver products, which helps simulation analysts to either validate results or include more advanced structural or fluid physics in the simulation.

Quickly define real-world boundary conditions

Enhanced expression capabilities in AIM let you use solution-dependent expressions for fluid boundary conditions and position dependent expressions for structural boundary conditions. With these new expression capabilities, you can quickly define the real-world conditions acting on your product designs.

Efficiently simulate one-way fluid-structure interaction

Simulating one-way fluid-structure interaction with structural shell elements is now possible in AIM. You can now model with shell elements a one-way transfer of fluid force from either an internal or external flow to a structural simulation.